Hotel Transylvania Brings the Box Office Back From the Dead

By Todd Allen

A $43M film debut in September? Unheard of? Not any more. Hotel Transylvania shook the movie theaters out of their slump in rather dramatic fashion. The other big debut, Bruce Willis/Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Looper, hit for $21M which would have made it a #1 film in recent weeks.

Positions #3-5 show very gentle drops for last week’s big debuts. Under 40% for End of Watch and Trouble With the Curve. 41.8% down for House at the End of the Street. You have two small release films in the top 10. The Master is up to 856 screen and is *almost* a wide release at this point. Pitch Perfect doesn’t go wide until next week, but managed to snag the #6 slot by averaging $15,522 across a mere 335 screens.

The #10 film, Won’t Back Down is also a debut. An inspirational teacher drama that only averaged $1,074/screen. Not a good way to hold on to screens.

What about last week’s new comic book movie, Dredd? Dredd was #11 with $2.28M. Interestingly, given that it didn’t preform very well last week, it actually gained 51 screens. Still, the per screen average was just $892. That’s not great. Dredd seems to have nothing but glowing word of mouth. If you’re going to see it, see it soon. That screen average doesn’t tend to hold theaters.

The Dark Knight Rises is still hanging around with another $800K. It looks like it’s destined to finish at the #7 movie on both the domestic and global charts. The Dark Knight was a bigger film domestically, but The Dark Knight Rises really packed them in overseas. Dark Knight Rises is down to 655 screens, but that $1,221 average is one of the healthiest outside the top 10.

The Avengers was not tracked this week, so it’s effectively out of circulation as the DVDs now out.

Next week’s big release will be the 3,000+ screen Taken 2, with Liam Neeson revisiting his 24-esque role as a former government operative looking for some kidnappers. Perhaps of particular interest to Beat readers, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie finally makes it to the screen. 2,900 of them, as it were. It will be interesting to see how this compares to Dark Shadow’s numbers. Finally, this week’s #6 film, Pitch Perfect, goes wide with 2,700+ screens. Pitch Perfect performed extremely well in limited release, so we’ll see what happens when everyone else gets the option of seeing it.

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Comments

Snikt Snakt: As I understand it, theaters are usually contracted to exhibit major releases for at least two full weeks, which means that Dredd will be kicked to the curb starting this Friday. I’m going to catch it tonight.